The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

While getting my haircut recently, my stylist told me a tale -- the outlines of which are familiar to many small businesses -- of an employee who had been stealing from the salon for years. In this case, it was the receptionist. She had been fudging the invoices for expensive shampoo and hair products the salon ordered from a manufacturer to hide the fact that she was taking bottles of the stuff home to sell on eBay. The salon thinks it's out at least $17,000 from her pilfering over the years. They had noticed some abnormalities around bookkeeping but shrugged them off until a florist came into the salon who had worked with the receptionist before and warned that she'd been "burned" by her. That's when the owners did a closer combing of their books, and realized they needed to cut her off.

The story left me wondering how the same scenario might play out in the future. We live in an increasingly information-perfect society. Years from now, will that florist's review live in the ether where the salon can read it, rather than it stumbling into their store by chance? That's the future imagined in Gary Shteyngart's excellent Super Sad True Love Story. Everyone has a review page devoted to them -- on everything from their bedroom prowess to their credit rating -- that's accessible in real time thanks to their being tagged in an operating system powered by something like Google Glass. That may sound cray cray, but we're starting to get there more quickly, thanks in part to the sharing economy.

Data brokers and companies have been profiling, reviewing, and rating us for years. But Uber, Sidecar, Airbnb, Getaround and other players in the sharing economy have ushered in the practice of our regularly reviewing and rating each other. You're prompted to rate people continually. As soon as I fire up Uber for another ride, I'm asked to rate the last one. People on Airbnb don't get far without reviews and so it's one of the first things a hoster and a hostee do after a vacation has ended. Over at Wired, Jason Tanz teases out this concept in a piece about how Airbnb and Lyft have finally gotten Americans to trust each other. In part, we're willing to get in strangers' cars and sleep in strangers' rooms (or have strangers ride or sleep in ours) because of the trust that Facebook has built up around real world identity. Having a Facebook account makes you "real" and less suspicious. But you could still be a gigantic jerk. What gets us to really trust strangers is our reliance on the power of the review (and these companies' algorithm efforts to screen out the fake ones). From Wired:

That’s the carrot side of a more intimate economy, the idea that treating people well will result in a better experience. There is a stick side as well: Act badly and you’ll be barred from participat­ing. Nick Grossman, a general manager at Union Square Ventures and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, says that while Uber drivers are generally positive about the service, he has spoken with some who worry about picking up a ­couple of bad reviews, falling below the acceptable rating threshold, and getting fired. (The same holds for passengers: Manit, the Lyft driver, says she won’t pick up anyone with less than a 4.3-star rating.)

“There’s a legitimate question: How do we feel about living in an environment of hyper-accountability?” Grossman asks. “It’s very effective at producing certain outcomes. It’s also very Darwinian.” Just like resi­dents of pre-industrial America, sharing-economy participants know that every transaction contributes to a reputation that will follow them, potentially for the rest of their lives.

Right now, the reputations built up from a series of one-on-one reviews follow us only on particular services and apps. But we sign into most of those apps through one service: Facebook. I suspect that eventually, we will all have star ratings attached to Facebook profiles or something like them, with reviews from many different contexts. This will have some significant (and potentially horrifying) privacy implications, much as Google footprints have in the digital world. A bad one-night stand review might haunt you at social events for years. One thing is for sure: my salon would be giving that ex-receptionist a very low rating.